ARTSBEAT; Frank Zappa Bust Unveiled in Baltimore

By DAVE ITZKOFF

Published: September 21, 2010

''There will come a time,'' Frank Zappa sang, ''when everybody who is lonely will be free to sing and dance and love.'' And there will come a time, he vowed, ''when you can even take your clothes off when you dance.'' Until then, the city of Baltimore has found a more traditional way to honor Zappa, the genre-bending avant-garde rock musician who was born in Baltimore and died in 1993, with a bust in his likeness that was dedicated there on Sunday, The Associated Press reported. In a ceremony timed to the 25th anniversary of Zappa's Senate testimony, at which he compared the labeling of explicit records to censorship, and attended by Zappa's widow, Gail, his sons, Dweezil and Ahmet, and daughter Diva, as well as Baltimore's mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a bust of the mustachioed, pony-tailed Zappa was unveiled atop a 12-foot pole outside the Southeast Anchor Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. It isn't very large, but the bust is a replica of a similar sculpture in Vilnius, Lithuania. The duplicate was donated to Baltimore by the Lithuanian nonprofit organization ZAPPART. ''He'd be wildly amused by this,'' Gail Zappa told The A.P., ''because of the absurdity of these guys in Lithuania coming up with this phenomenal sculptor who normally does busts of Stalin.''

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.